1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer-aided analysis of media material.
2. Related Art
Computers are increasingly being used to perform or aid analysis of documents and printed material. Layout analysis techniques and systems have been used to analyze the location and relative arrangement of text and images in a document. Such document layout analysis can be important in many document imaging applications. For example, document layout analysis can be used as part of layout-based document retrieval, text extract using optical character recognition, reflowing documents, and conversion of document images into electronic form. Document layout analysis generally works best on simple documents, such as a business letter or single column report, and can be difficult or even unworkable when layouts are complex or variable. For instance, automated or semi-automated document layout analysis often fails on complex layouts and resort must be made to manual analysis of layouts.
Media material having columns of body text arranged in a layout create special challenges to document layout analysis. For example, newspaper layouts are generally very complicated, combining many articles and logical elements closely together on a page. Figuring out the structure of a newspaper is naturally done by humans with article context, pattern matching, and possibly newspaper style: elements that are more natural for humans than computers. Automated methods have generally relied mostly on graphical or geometric features alone, and hence make many mistakes, as there is no consistent set of simple rules that works across all newspapers. Such limited automated methods have further difficulty analyzing articles that continue across two or pages of a media material.
What is needed are improved systems and methods for analyzing media material having a layout.